Usenet, qu'est-ce que c'est?

It took me six years of denizenry and reaching the age of 23 to find that place completely non-threatening (if that is what is meant by laughable). I'd like to think I'm not an exceptional case, because this change in perspective came at the expense of a number of beliefs, and it would make me very sad me to find that, at age fifteen and after six months of unsupervised navigation, a kid would lose those, or, worse, never had them in the first place. If you're just being hyperbolic to show off how worldly you are, please don't do that.

Also, I'm discovering that many of the French servers are censored/curated, and mostly free of spam. Upon further investigation, it appears that European Usenet servers applied some "benevolent dictatorship" to the discussions and posts they allowed, and only later did companies who did no censorship come into the fray. Or something like that.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

With usenet, it's all up to the respective server admins as to what is or isn't allowed. At least before they started dropping usenet entirely, the major internet connectivity providers didn't bother with policing their servers much outside of responding to reports of abuse (and often not even then, as they simply didn't give a shit about something that wasn't a revenue source for them), whereas those running usenet servers for a university did tend to clamp down (to varying degrees) on what goes in and out of the network, if for no other reason than to not have their feed rendered useless by crap.

edited 28th Dec '12 11:19:05 PM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

The worst it got was people saying they were lovers with their parents or siblings, which, to be honest, makes me shrug.

There was also stuff like the guy who kept posting his detailed fantasies of raping, killing, and eating the Nostalgia Critic (not necessarily in that order) - Crinias, I think his name was - and the whole Noble Bigot Troper Tales page. Plus, it gave TV Tropes's small but vocal paedophile population a place to run amok, which went about as well as anyone who's seen Signed's infamous Gushing About Shows You Like entries for Kodomo No Jikan and Arcade Gamer Fubuki would expect.

It really did get pretty bad in places, and the moderation just wasn't interested in regular cleanings when outright deletion would be easier.

edited 28th Dec '12 11:26:43 PM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

Yes, that is moderation SOP: perfectly understandable, reasonable and sensible. No reason to give tropers the opportunity to say how they personally relate to a trope if it will end up in a vocal minority making the community look (very) bad in the eyes of the public.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The reasoning, as I recall, was that it was off-mission for the rest of the wiki, which made it less of a loss if they decided to dump it, and that whilst few of the entries were that terrible, most of them were really dull and/or filled to the brim with shit-that-didn't-happen. They also had a bad habit of encouraging Trope Decay.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Now imagine if TVT had been built over Usenet (would that have been even possible?)

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

<shudders> Please... don't make me go there, even as a thought experiment... <shudders again>

Well, you can't edit posts, so my hypothesis would be that building a wiki there would be kind of impossible.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Usenet is what the internet was called when the idea of the internet was still a new and exciting one.

sometimes I feel like I know you from somewhere any information please call 555....

They overlap, but Usenet uses info channels that aren't Internet, and Internet did a lot more things than Usenet. Saying "Usenet is the Internet" is kind of like saying "Tumblr+Facebook+Google (and all dependencies thereof)+Twitter+4chan+Something Awful+Wordpress+Livejournal+Sigma(PornAggregators) = The Internet"

edited 29th Dec '12 9:19:44 AM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Usenet has become another method of digital piracy for those that don't like torrents, for what it's worth.

That is probably true for a surprising amount of people out there...

Programming and surgery have a lot of things in common: Don't start removing colons until you know what you're doing.